In means of conveyance, such as motor vehicles, airplanes or ships, permanently installed navigation systems quickly, easily and reliably guide the driver of the means of conveyance from a present location to a desired destination without requiring the driver of the means of conveyance to go to the trouble of planning a route and obtaining the appropriate maps ahead of time. For this purpose, navigation data based on, for example, charts, geographic maps or road maps are stored in the navigation system, for example on CD-ROM. The navigation system uses, for example, a global positioning system (GPS) to determine a present location and calculate navigation instructions that lead to a predetermined destination. The navigation data preferably includes information about roads and routes for motor vehicles.
However, before the navigation system can perform its function and calculate a route from the starting location to the destination, a user enters the desired destination and, in non-GPS navigation systems, possibly the present location as well. This is done, for example, using a manual input device, with the user having to sequentially retrieve or scroll to, and then select, letters in a character table until the selected letters and numbers form, for example, a city name, a street name and a house number of the destination or starting location. However, this is both complicated and time-consuming and requires a certain amount of basic skill in operating the navigation system. This input also takes a certain amount of time, which can be especially disadvantageous if the user is having an emergency in an unknown area and must quickly reach, for example, a hospital or police station. The need to first laboriously determine the location, for example, of the nearest hospital and program the navigation system to calculate a route to this nearest hospital takes up valuable time. Furthermore, it has been frequently observed that people involved in emergencies and suffering from the associated stress, often are no longer capable of remembering generally known emergency medical numbers (112 or 19222) and are certainly no longer able to enter information quickly and correctly into the navigation system. In such extraordinary circumstances, a person involved in an emergency in familiar surroundings often can no longer easily recall even a normally well known route to the nearest hospital.